Jewish Philanthropy and Enlightenment in Late-Tsarist Russia

14. The OPE in War and Revolution

14 The OPE in War and Revolution T he OPE rose to the challenges of World War I, turning into the kind of organization it wished it could have become in peacetime. The networks it had developed in the pre-war years and its natural role as a facilitator between the government and provincial Jews allowed it to serve as a center for the education of refugees. Receiving huge sums of money from the government and foreign Jews, the OPE was presented with a captive audience of over 20,000 students when whole Jewish communities were forcibly evacuated from the northwest and Ukraine. In July 1914, when the Russian government entered the war on the side of the Allies, England and France, the patriotism that captivated the entire country also gripped Russia’s Jews.1 The government demanded and the OPE agreed to exclude from the society those members who were citizens of enemy counties. The OPE stripped Herman Cohen (Marburg), Moritz Goudeman (Vienna), and M. Vishnitser of their OPE memberships.2 Soon after the war began and the Russian Army began to lose territory, refugees appeared. Apparently many people left their homes and fled eastward because they did not want to become separated from their relatives serving in the army or living on the Russian side. Others were frightened of German reprisals, while Jews on the front often found themselves badly treated by Russian forces. Jewish leaders “were taken hostage [by the Russian Army] supposedly to deter other Jews from helping the enemy.”3 Unmistakably , the evacuations of Jews occurred with a good deal of violence.4 206 According to John Klier, the Cossacks, many harboring ill will toward Jews, were assigned the job of clearing the front. These soldiers employed more force than they were supposed to.5 With the breakdown of law and order, opportunities arose to perpetrate pogroms. Jews became victims of murder, rape, destruction of property, and theft committed by the Russian Army, although such acts of violence were not officially part of state policy.6 According to one estimate, “600,000 Russian Jews were already displaced even before the mass deportations began in the summer of 1915.”7 Official sources give smaller figures: in January 1916, there were 158,751 Jewish refugees, by June, the number rose to 185,000, and in August, up to 215,511. According to unofficial sources, the number was closer to 250,000.8 Nevertheless a few things are certain: The sudden, sweeping, and often brutal displacement of several million subjects of the tsarist empire became in August 1915 a matter of ‘state importance,’ engaging the attention of generals, ministers, civil servants, courtiers, and Russia’s educated public. The underlying responsibility for having caused this displacement remained a matter for conjecture: the degree to which refugees were provoked by the Russian army or had ‘chosen’ to leave their homes continued to be a matter for animated discussion in the corridors of power and in the congresses of the public organizations. Wherever responsibility lay, however, it was clear that civilian agencies, rather than the army, would have to deal with the resettlement and welfare of several million refugees.9 With the outbreak of war, Russia’s Jews organized an umbrella organization to deal with relief: EKOPO (Evreiskii komitet pomoshchi zhertvam voiny).10 Altogether during the war, EKOPO distributed 30,787,000 rubles.11 Steven Zipperstein explains the sources of this funding: The budget for EKOPO was enormous when compared with prewar Jewish organizations . In 1914, ORT ran on R75,000. During EKOPO’s first year, by July 31, 1915, it had raised over R1.5 million from Russian Jews alone (R840,000 coming from Petrograd [St. Petersburg’s name was changed to a Slavicized form] and R750.000 from elsewhere in the empire). This sum did not include funds collected by the provincial relief bodies and spent locally. Funding for this ambitious venture was raised from a wide range of sources: Jews in the capitals and elsewhere who made donations; a self-taxation scheme of five percent introduced by EKOPO for its members in January 1915; the various voluntary Russian unions; The OPE in War and Revolution 207 eventually, the Russian government, which provided large sums; and sources abroad, primarily Jews in the United States and England. In time, EKOPO assumed responsibility for funding nearly all aspects of Jewish communal life.12 The work of EKOPO can be...